The Sexy Adventures of Lonk and Epwna

I grew up in a strictly Segan household and was never a fan of Zelda. So when people played Zelda on the NES, I had Phantasy Star on my Master System. It was basically this...

Yuck!

compared to that...

Rawr!

And yes, in the SNES era Zelda fans had this...

Yawn!

But I had this here...

Fuck your Zelda.

Spare me the lectures on how I'm comparing apples to Phantasy Star - both games were console JRPGs available at the same time on their respective system. And I happen to prefer Phantasy Star, which was eventually punished by Sega for changing the entire franchise into something completely different, because they hate their fans and love to shit on the childhoods of everyone who loved Phantasy Star, Shining Force and Sonic, to name just a few.

I did have an N64 and played Ocarina of Time back in the day, which was absolutely amazing and nothing short of breathtaking for its time. It also had the worst fucking water temple in any Zelda game ever, which is why I never completed the damn game. I beat the temple, mind you, but I had absolutely zero motivation to ever touch this game again when I was done with that bit. So, while the Zelda games are certainly all great and well-loved by their fans and what have you, I simply didn't play most of them and completed zero. Just not my cup of tea.

Anyone else sense a butt?

But then I ran out of stuff to play on my 3DS. The Terraria update is still not here, I've finished the first Fire Emblem and refuse to buy the second one three times in order to get the complete story, I'm done with Bravely Default and Bravely Second bores me to tears. And then everyone went a bit nuts over Hyrule Warriors Legends, which is a huge Zelda-Allstars hack'n'slash thing, so I figured, eh, why the fuck not and grabbed it. It's got some pretty sweet music, too!

I've put a ton of hours into this game and it simply doesn't end! It has some 24 or so playable characters, a ridiculously long story mode and tons of additional game modes and features, so you can probably play this thing for as long as you live. Granted, every level is pretty much the same, but with some changing baddies and scenery, but the mindless button-mashing action is extremely satisfying on the go. It's quickly turning into one of my favourite games, even though I know next to nothing about most characters and I reeeeally don't care.

Okay, I won't lie - I probably had a boner for Midna and I don't give a fuck if you judge me. I know someone who flicks it to Star Trek porn fics, another acquaintance of mine dresses up in a bunny costume before sex and one of my friends wants to fuck a cartoon hedgehog. Looks like absolutely everybody is into weird shit and apparently potbellied midgets do it for me. Anyhow.

Claire watched me play Hyrule Warriors for awhile until she decided to have another go at Twilight Princess. Alas, the ol' Gamecube is at her family's place, so we had to fire up Dolphin in order to run the game. Twilight Princess has aged fairly well for a decade-old game, though most textures are incredibly muddy, even if you crank the game resolution all the way up to 4k. A low-quality texture is a low-quality texture, no matter what resolution you play on. So I looked into emulator texture modding and one thing lead to another and....

I used Dolphin quite a bit over the years, but my biggest concern was always running stuff like F-Zero GX and Smash Bros. at acceptable speeds. Or playing the Metroid Prime Trilogy with mouse and keyboard, which is actually pretty awesome when you get it to work. It's also a huge pain in the ass, because one configuration may be perfect for one game and totally break another, so I never spend any massive amount of time trying to actually finish any of these games.

Today, Dolphin runs on DX12 (kinda), it's faster and more stable than ever and there's even support for all sorts of post-processing effects. And yes, apparently you can insert custom textures into all your games to make them look a little less dated. Twilight Princess may not look "next gen" by any means, but it still looks hell of a lot better than it did back in the day.

And now I wait for the content strike from Nintendo.

So now I get to enjoy this old game with ambient occlusion, depth of field and all sorts of other fancy shit I won't pretend I understand, which all helps make the game a little less ugly. It's a bit of a mixed bag, as some of the more photo-realistic textures clash heavily with the surrounding lower-quality stuff. But it's still a big improvement.

The tree bark looks amazing, but that fern in front of it looks like total ass.

I'm also not a huge fan of how the whole thing is limited to 30 FPS even when you emulate it, but that's what I get for being a spoiled PC gamer. For what it counts, I'm enjoying the whole thing a little more than I enjoyed Ocarina back in the day. Though Midna is a total cunt, so far. Shame. She's pretty awesome in Hyrule Warriors, so maybe she'll become more likable in Twilight Princess as one progresses through the story. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and hang on to those rule34 bookmarks for now.

Speaking of all things gaming and HD, it looks like Youtube finally supports resolutions above 1080p at 60 FPS. In the past I could only choose between 60 FPS and resolutions greater than 1080p, but never both. Now I can have both, which should be a cool feature for upcoming Warframe videos. Bit rate still isn't ideal, there are some annoying artifacts and footage never looks as good as the actual game, but it's better than it was. Look!

In other news, Haggy beat me for the first ever time (well, first three times, really) on Street Fighter V. Counting all our matches in Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters XIII and SFV I've probably won 100 or more fights in a row. He switched characters to Laura and I have absolutely no idea when it's safe to attack, when I should defend or how to defend against Laura's attacks. Which is great, because this will finally force me to improve and learn something new. The first time we all played together in a lobby with 7 people I constantly had to queue back up at the end of the line after beating everybody, because people were getting tired of fighting me. Maybe this is finally gonna change things a bit. I'm happy he kept on practicing long and hard enough to finally get the hang of it. In a perfect world we'll get this friendly rivalry going where we'll take turns at who gets the upper hand, constantly forcing each other to learn new tricks. It's how I used to play Street Fighter 2 against my brother and it's really the best way to play any fighting game.

I only ever play one character, because I'm lazy. I could try and pick something else for a change, surprise him a bit and mix things up a little, but that's just not my style. I'm just gonna dick around with Ken some more until I get the upper hand again. This may take a while and I'm okay with that. It's about time I get a challenge and something to master. Wiping the floor with everybody is fun, but you learn nothing that way. This is where the real fun begins.